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Aleksander Smolar - My Polish and Jewish identities (106/201)

157 views · Published 19 December 2018 · 1:27 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: [VT] Jewish summer youth camp, so you were 16,17,18 years old...

Yes.

[VT] … when you were going to these…

Yes, it was more or less around that time. But you could also say that I had one life that was entirely Polish and that was school, later university and then my other life which was these contacts preserved in the Jewish world, not preserved but constructed rather because this period of attending Jewish school was short. I was only there for the first three years of primary school. Well, there was my home where there were a couple… well, two boys who were my friends and were a bit younger than I was. But later, there were the summer youth camps and Club Babel which were partly connected with one another. They were the same people. But also there were already very strong tendencies among them towards leaving and to distancing themselves from Poland and identifying with the Jewish world. This never affected me, I mean I always identified very strongly with Poland even when I was participating in… that was really very nice, very pleasant, these people were usually on a very high intellectual level. There were… we played, in fact, both of us played bridge, it was simply… it was a real club with a rich variety of activities.

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